This episode is described in the text of an incunabula from the life of the saints, which appeared in Augsburg in 1489...

When the patient woke up, the pain did not happen. He got up and ordered his servants to bring candles. He always told me what had happened to him. People ran to the coffin of the Moor and saw a cut off leg. They rejoiced at the miracle that was accomplished and thanked God and the saints of Cosmas and Damian with fervor. "

Top image: School of Castile and Leon, 'Saints Cosmas and Damian Healing a Christian with the Leg of a Dead Moor', 1460-1480. Both images via Marinni's LiveJournal, where there are additional depictions of the legend.

A new Fox News poll out this week
shows Sanders has a +28 net favorability rating among the US
population, dwarfing all other elected politicians on both ends of the
political spectrum. And he’s even more popular among the vaunted
“independents”, where he is at a mind boggling +41...

One would think with numbers like that, Democratic politicians would be
falling all over themselves to be associated with Sanders, especially
considering the party as a whole is more unpopular
than the Republicans and even Donald Trump right now. Yet instead of
embracing his message, the establishment wing of the party continues to
resist him at almost every turn, and they seem insistent that they don’t
have to change their ways to gain back the support of huge swaths of
the country....

Democrats seem more than happy to put all the blame of the 2016 election
on a combination of Russia and James Comey and have engaged in almost
zero introspection on the root causes of the larger reality...

In other words, they’re doubling down on the exact same failing strategy
that Clinton used in the final months of the campaign. Sanders himself put it this way
in his usual blunt style in an interview with New York magazine this
week – when asked about whether the Democrats can adapt to the political
reality, he said: “There are some people in the Democratic Party who
want to maintain the status quo. They would rather go down with the
Titanic so long as they have first-class seats.”

“It’s
time to release them all,” said Tunheim, the former chair of an
independent panel that declassified thousands of JFK records in the
1990s.

The National Archives retains a trove of more than 3,500 JFK assassination records, obtained by Tunheim’s review board, that have never been seen by the public. The records are historically significant.

The unseen CIA files include 2,000 pages of transcripts of the CIA’s harsh interrogation of KGB defector Yuri Nosenko, who
handled Lee Harvey Oswald’s file for Soviet intelligence service. They
also include CIA files of senior undercover officers in 1963 such as Bill Harvey, David Phillips and Howard Hunt. All
three believed Kennedy’s policies were dangerously weak, perhaps even
treasonous. Harvey and Phillips are known to have mounted assassination
operations.

The JFK Records Act of 1992 mandates the release of all of these records by October 26, 2017.

In
his Press Club comments, Tunheim, the senior federal judge in
Minnesota, noted that President Trump and White House General Counsel
Donald McGahn face important decisions about these records. The
leadership of the CIA, including Trump-appointed director Mike Pompeo,
may prefer that some of this material remain secret.

At his most productive, Twain practically
chain-smoked cigars, and his craving for a quick burn was conspicuous at
250-acre Quarry Farm, a nest of solitude away from the social
hurly-burly of Hartford.

After a steak breakfast, Twain would saunter 300
feet across a lawn flecked with buttercups and black-eyed susans and
climb the stone steps to a promontory where the octagonal cabin was
perched. Amid the chirp and crackle of nature, overlooking a panorama he
called a "foretaste of heaven," Twain often churned out as many as
2,600 words a day...

To thwart vandals and accommodate tourists, the cabin was moved down to the Elmira College campus in 1952.

The top photo shows the study at its current location on the campus. The original location offered way more spectacular views.

Does the title seem ungrammatical to you? If so, you're probably not from the Upper Midwest, where that terminal "with" is a common construction. Last night I watched the movie "Fargo" and heard that sentence in the dialogue.

Historical immigration patterns are probably responsible:

In [North-Central American English], the preposition with is used without an object as an adverb in phrases like come with, as in Do you want to come with? for standard Do you want to come with me? or with us?. In standard English, other prepositions can be used as adverbs, like go down (down as adverb) for go down the stairs (down as preposition). With is not typically used in this way in standard English (particularly in British and its clone Irish
English because of being distinguished as the original form of the
English language), and this feature likely came from languages spoken by some immigrants, such as Scandinavian... German.. or Dutch... all of which have this construction, like Swedish kom med.

While diving in the semi-tropical region of Amami Oshima,
roughly 80 ft below sea level, Ookata spotted something he had never
seen. And as it turned out, no one else had seen it before either...

On the seabed a geometric, circular structure measuring roughly 6.5 ft
in diameter had been precisely carved from sand. It consisted of
multiple ridges, symmetrically jutting out from the center, and appeared
to be the work of an underwater artist, carefully working with tools...

Underwater cameras showed that the artist was a small puffer fish who,
using only his flapping fin, tirelessly worked day and night to carve
the circular ridges. The unlikely artist – best known in Japan as a
delicacy, albeit a potentially poisonous one – even takes small shells,
cracks them, and lines the inner grooves of his sculpture as if
decorating his piece. Further observation revealed that this “mysterious
circle” was not just there to make the ocean floor look pretty.
Attracted by the grooves and ridges, female puffer fish would find their
way along the dark seabed to the male puffer fish where they would mate
and lay eggs in the center of the circle. In fact, the scientists
observed that the more ridges the circle contained, the more likely it
was that the female would mate with the male.

The lower embed shows how small the fish is in comparison to his artwork. I've seen tiny little scooped-out nests in the sand made by freshwater fish, but never anything this elaborate. It reminds me of the creations of bower birds.

Arnold Schwarzenegger posted a video congratulating the winners of the Special Olympics World Games. Some dickhead troll responded -

“The Special Olympics make no sense. The Olympics are for the best athletes in the entire world to compete
against each other to determine who is the best,” the individual wrote.
“Having retards competing is doing the opposite!”

I've embedded his response above.

"... no one will ever remember you." More Terminator than Kindergarten Cop.

I’m going to tell you that libraries are important. I’m going to suggest
that reading fiction, that reading for pleasure, is one of the most
important things one can do. I’m going to make an impassioned plea for
people to understand what libraries and librarians are, and to preserve
both of these things...

Fiction has two uses. Firstly, it’s a gateway drug to reading... it forces you to learn new words, to think new thoughts, to keep going.
To discover that reading per se is pleasurable. Once you learn that,
you’re on the road to reading everything...

The simplest way to make sure that we raise literate children is to
teach them to read, and to show them that reading is a pleasurable
activity. And that means, at its simplest, finding books that they
enjoy, giving them access to those books, and letting them read them.

I don’t think there is such a thing as a bad book for children. Every
now and again it becomes fashionable among some adults to point at a
subset of children’s books, a genre, perhaps, or an author, and to
declare them bad books, books that children should be stopped from
reading. I’ve seen it happen over and over; Enid Blyton was declared a
bad author, so was RL Stine, so were dozens of others. Comics have been
decried as fostering illiteracy.

It’s tosh. It’s snobbery and it’s foolishness. There are no bad authors
for children, that children like and want to read and seek out, because
every child is different...

And the second thing fiction does is to build empathy. When you watch TV
or see a film, you are looking at things happening to other people... You get to feel things, visit places and worlds you would never
otherwise know. You learn that everyone else out there is a me, as well.
You’re being someone else, and when you return to your own world,
you’re going to be slightly changed...

You’re also finding out something as you read vitally important for making your way in the world. And it’s this: The world doesn’t have to be like this. Things can be different...

...libraries are about freedom. Freedom to read, freedom of ideas,
freedom of communication. They are about education (which is not a
process that finishes the day we leave school or university), about
entertainment, about making safe spaces, and about access to
information.

I worry that here in the 21st century people misunderstand what
libraries are and the purpose of them. If you perceive a library as a
shelf of books, it may seem antiquated or outdated in a world in which
most, but not all, books in print exist digitally. But that is to miss
the point fundamentally.

I think it has to do with nature of information. Information has value, and the right information has enormous value...

I do not believe that all books will or should migrate onto screens: as
Douglas Adams once pointed out to me, more than 20 years before the
Kindle turned up, a physical book is like a shark. Sharks are old: there
were sharks in the ocean before the dinosaurs. And the reason there are
still sharks around is that sharks are better at being sharks than
anything else is. Physical books are tough, hard to destroy,
bath-resistant, solar-operated, feel good in your hand: they are good at
being books, and there will always be a place for them...

We have an obligation to support libraries. To use libraries, to
encourage others to use libraries, to protest the closure of libraries.
If you do not value libraries then you do not value information or
culture or wisdom. You are silencing the voices of the past and you are
damaging the future.

I had to refrain from inserting even more text from this insightful commentary. I encourage you to read (and share) the fulltext here.

...they use the excess
heat from inside the distillery to be able to create a greenhouse
environment outside and allow the distillery to grow tropical and Mediterranean herbs and spices directly on site. Herbs and spices that
are then used in their gin products.

From a 2010 article in the WSJ (the numbers might have changed a bit since then):

According to a Wall Street Journal study of four recent broadcasts, and
similar estimates by researchers, the average amount of time the ball is
in play on the field during an NFL game is about 11 minutes...

So what do the networks do with the other 174 minutes in a typical
broadcast? Not surprisingly, commercials take up about an hour. As many
as 75 minutes, or about 60% of the total air time, excluding
commercials, is spent on shots of players huddling, standing at the line
of scrimmage or just generally milling about between snaps. In the four
broadcasts The Journal studied, injured players got six more seconds of
camera time than celebrating players. While the network announcers
showed up on screen for just 30 seconds, shots of the head coaches and
referees took up about 7% of the average show...

This is why the only way I watch football nowadays is by using a DVR and speeding through the game (and past the commercials).

Reposted from 2012 to add news of developments in 2017:

"It has been an effort for a long period of time. We've talked about the
length of the game," [NFL Commissioner] Goodell said. "This effort's not as focused on the
length of the game. This is focused on what's happening outside the
plays -- how fast we get the ball set, the number of breaks, the number
of intrusions -- so that fans can focus on the action."

With all this talk about making the game faster for fans, what would Goodell consider the ideal length of a broadcast?

"We (were at) 3:07 and change (last season), down about a minute,"
Goodell said. "We think we could probably get pretty close to five
minutes of downtime out of the game, so that would bring you somewhere
in the 3:02 range. That would be very successful if we could get to that
point. But, again, not just the length. We want to make sure we are
taking the right things out of the game -- the things that are not
compelling to our fans."

Clueless. The idea that cutting 5 minutes out of a 3-hour broadcast will satisfy fans' frustrations shows that viewer interests don't even begin to compete with advertiser's interests.

There are some dilemmas of modern life that our grandparents could never have imagined. In various locations around this country there is an ongoing public debate about the disposal of dog poop. Everyone agrees that the dog's owner should pick it up - but there is disagreement about the proper disposal.

The dog's owner is out for a walk. The dog poops four blocks from home. The owner bags the poop. It's garbage pick-up day and the containers are at curbside. Does he/she place the bagged poop in a nearby container, or carry it all the way home?

According to Minneapolis ordinances,
you can’t put “substances or materials of any kind” in a residential
garbage can “when the substances or materials were generated at a location other than the residence.”

In St. Paul,
ordinances say when a dog poops on someone else’s property, the dog
owner has to remove the poop “to a proper receptacle located on property
owned or possessed” by the dog owner.

Discussion and various proposed solutions (including stickers to put on garbage cans) at the StarTribune.

This Twilight Zone closing summary has been widely cited in recent months:

The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs and explosions
and fallout. There are weapons that are simply thoughts, attitudes,
prejudices to be found only in the minds of men. For the record,
prejudices can kill, and suspicion can destroy, and a thoughtless
frightened search for a scapegoat has a fallout all of its own for the
children, and the children yet unborn. And the pity of it is that these
things cannot be confined to the Twilight Zone.

23 March 2017

The painting is "Wivenhoe Park" by John Constable, currently in the collections of the National Gallery of Art.

I first saw this painting about 30 years ago in a print that was on the wall of the office of a colleague of mine at the University of Kentucky. After looking at the painting for a while, I initially concluded that the artist (world famous for his landscape portrayals) must have made an error in depicting the scene. Nobody else seemed interested in the apparent anomaly, and I lost track of the painting (not knowing its title) until I encountered it again this past week.

I invite you to explore the image (it should enlarge to wallpaper size with a click) to see if you find anything that appears internally inconsistent in the content.

Wivenhoe Park is a real, not an imaginary, place - a country estate in Essex. Two seemingly contradictory aspects of the painting have puzzled me. Left center of the image there is a bridge spanning the watercourse:

The flow of the water is clearly from the left of the painting toward the right. Now look downstream to where two fishermen are working their net:

This is presumably a gill net of some sort, spanning the watercourse from shore to shore, held up by cork floats. They are presumably lifting it in segments to harvest any fish that have become entrapped.

But... the curvature of the net would be consistent with water flowing from the right of the picture toward the left, not left-to-right as the bridge at the left would indicate.

It's a curious mistake for a landscape artist to make - especially an artist as skilled as Constable, and especially when drawing from life rather than from imagination. I decided that for a painting as large and complex as this one, he must have made preparatory sketches and that his sketch of the fishermen must have been made from the opposite shore, then incorporated into the landscape "backwards." I thought I found confirmation in this comment from an analysis at the V&A:

So perhaps a sort of "compositional error." I considered other possibilities. I found the location of Google Maps and zoomed in to confirm that the watercourse in the painting is remote from the sea, so the bowing of the fishing nets is not the result of tidal flow.

But now a different apparent anomaly bothered me. The Google map confirmed that this isn't a rushing river. It's not even a decent-sized creek. In fact if you look at the pipe passing through the dam under the bridge, the flow is almost negligible. So why is the net bowed? It clearly goes from shore to shore, not in a huge circle.

Now it's as clear as day. The net is being dragged by 4-5 people on each shore (in retrospect they are visible on the far shore in the final painting). I note also that the V&A entitles this sketch "Fishing with a net on the lake in Wivenhoe Park." Not a river or stream - just a manmade lake (large pond, really) prettified by a wealthy landowner employing a landscape architect:

End of story? Sort of. At least in terms of the faithfulness of the representation, Constable has been vindicated, and my original concerns are "much ado about nothing."

But now I'm interested in something else. My (incorrect) impression from the painting was that it portrayed two fishermen as incidental elements in a landscape. Now the activity appears to be way more than a recreational pastime. This is a large crew - a dozen grown men dragging a lake for fish. On a private estate. These are hired hands - a crew assembled for this purpose.

This painting was commissioned by the Rebow family, so Constable incorporated aspects that would be important to the family - including their eleven-year-old daughter Mary driving a donkey cart on the hillside to the left (inset right).

The dragging of the lake must also be important, and I would therefore conclude that the harvest of the fish was significant (important enough to employ all the gardeners on the estate and maybe some hired hands as well.)

Which brings me to my final point (at last, and the reason for posting this long-winded entry in the first place) - aquaculture as a likely practice on English country estates.

This book is being published in order to highlight a little-known aspect of
animal husbandry in former times, namely the keeping, storing and cultivation of crucian carp (Carassius carassius
), carp (Cyprinus carpio), tench
(Tinca tinca) and other cyprinids in man-made ponds... The
construction of fishponds began across Europe, and increased rapidly during
the twelfth and thirteenth century. At
that time, fishponds were constructed on estates belonging to bishops, monasteries and royalty across England... The balance of evidence now indicates that fishponds were introduced
into Britain after the Norman Conquest (1066) as a secular aristocratic
initiative rather than a monastic innovation... The abundance of literary references to fishponds shows that their possession, along with mills, dovecotes and deer parks, was one of the privyleges
of manorial landholders, a badge of rank as much as a practical utility... Many royal castles, palaces, manor-houses and hunting-lodges were equipped with fishponds... An account book for
1632–6 kept by the Duke of Suffolk’s estate steward records the cleaning-out
of the Lulworth Castle fishponds at a cost of £9 4s 8d and the purchase of a
‘trammell nett’ (a long, narrow fishing-net held vertically in the water by
floats and sinkers, consisting of two walls of large-meshed netting, between
which a narrow-meshed net was loosely hung) for catching the fish... The fishing of Stonehead Lake in 1793 produced 2,000
carp ‘of large dimensions’, including one 8 kg specimen... By the 1740s the geometrically-shaped ponds associated with formal gardens
were passing out of fashion. Some were abandoned, others altered, as
revolutionary ideas of ‘landscape’ gardening encouraged the creation of
larger lakes of more ‘natural’ appearance... Yet some
advocates of agricultural improvement were still promoting fishponds as a
contribution to the farming economy into the early nineteenth century... Frensham Great Pond was still emptied
every five years for fishing-out as late as 1858...

Constable completed Wivenhoe Park in 1816, so apparently aquaculture was still a going concern at that estate. I wonder if such efforts were revived during the relative scarcities of WWII. I'd especially like to hear any input from British readers of this blog regarding this subject.

The iris collarette is a landmark that separates the central pupillary
zone from the peripheral ciliary zone. It is typically flat but can be
prominent, as seen in this patient. This finding is a normal variant. It
is benign and asymptomatic and requires no treatment.

The main causes of the decline are the imposition of restrictive
measures by China's central government - with the equivalent of 600
coal-fired units being put on hold until at least 2020... there have also been significant retirements of coal plants in
Europe and the US over the past two years, with roughly 120 large units
being taken out of commission.

"However abrupt, the shift from fossil fuels to clean sources in the
power sector is a positive one for health, climate security, and jobs.
And by all indications, the shift is unstoppable."

Maybe American politicians would respond more favorably to the concept of "climate security" than to "climate change."

A 17-year-old girl in California created a website "where users click on Donald Trump’s face to punch him with tiny kitten paws."

But what was meant as nothing more than a jokey website for coding
practice has turned into a legal nightmare. Now Lucy is facing the wrath
of the big man himself.

Three weeks after the site went live, Lucy was served a cease and
desist letter from Trump’s general counsel stationed in Trump Tower on
Fifth Avenue in NYC.

The letter, confirmed by the Observer, reads
exactly as you’d expect a Trump C&D would. It begins touting him as a
“well-known businessman” and television star and boasts, “As I’m sure
you’re aware, the Trump name is internationally known and famous.”

Guided by a family lawyer, Lucy changed the name of the site to KittenFeed.com

21 March 2017

“There are a ton of chess mistakes in TV and in film,” says Mike Klein, a writer and videographer for Chess.com.
While different experts cite different error ratios, from “20 percent”
to “much more often than not,” all agree: Hollywood is terrible at
chess, even though they really don’t have to be. “There are so many
[errors], it’s hard to keep track,” says Grandmaster Ilja Zaragatski, of
chess24. “And there are constantly [new ones] coming out.”

Chess errors come in a few different
flavors, these experts say. The most common is what we’ll call the Bad
Setup. When you set up a chessboard, you’re supposed to orient it so
that the square nearest to each player’s right side is light-colored.
(There’s even a mnemonic for this—“right is light.”) Next, when you
array the pieces, the white queen goes on white, and the black queen
goes on black. “When I teach six-year-old girls, I say ‘the queen’s
shoes have to match her dress!’” says Klein.

Six-year-olds may get this, but filmmakers often do not. Along with The Seventh Seal, movies that suffer from Bad Setups include Blade Runner, Austin Powers, From Russia with Love, The Shawshank Redemption, and Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls.Shaft and What’s New Pussycat may not have much in common, but they do both feature backwards chessboards.

For your essay today, class, you will compare and contrast two of the leaders of major countries in terms of their knowledge about nuclear energy and nuclear weapons.

Mr. Trump's comments (on the left) can be viewed in this video. Fortunately, at the time he was not speaking to Angela Merkel, whose doctoral dissertation (on the right) translates as:

"Study of the mechanism of decomposition with single bond breaking and calculation of their rate constant on the basis of quantum mechanical and statistical methods." ("Dissertation to obtain the academic degree doctor in a branch of science - diploma physicist Angela Merkel...")

Homer’s descriptions of color in The Iliad and The Odyssey,
taken literally, paint an almost psychedelic landscape: in addition to
the sea, sheep were also the color of wine; honey was green, as were the
fear-filled faces of men; and the sky is often described as bronze.

It gets stranger. Not only was Homer’s palette limited to only five
colors (metallics, black, white, yellow-green, and red), but a prominent
philosopher even centuries later, Empedocles, believed that all color
was limited to four categories: white/light, dark/black, red, and
yellow. Xenophanes, another philosopher, described the rainbow as having
but three bands of color: porphyra (dark purple), khloros, and erythros (red).

The conspicuous absence of blue is not limited to the Greeks. The
color “blue” appears not once in the New Testament, and its appearance
in the Torah is questioned (there are two words argued to be types of
blue, sappir and tekeleth, but the latter appears to be arguably purple, and neither color is used, for instance, to describe the sky).

Further discussion in an interesting column at the Clarkesworld sci-fi e-magazine.With a tip of the blogging cap to the elves at No Such Thing as a Fish for mentioning this in a recent podcast.

19 March 2017

I watched this movie earlier this week and can unreservedly recommend it.

A Man Called Ove (Swedish: En man som heter Ove, pronounced [ˈuːvɛ]) is a Swedish comedy-drama film... The film was written and directed by Hannes Holm, and is based on author Fredrik Backman's 2012 book of the same name. In the leading role as Ove is Rolf Lassgård. The film was nominated for six awards, winning two, at the 51st Guldbagge Awards in 2016. It was nominated for the Best Foreign Language Film and Best Makeup and Hairstyling categories at the 89th Academy Awards.

It's clearly not a Hollywood-style movie, featuring a curmudgeonly older man rather than a superhero, in a story where nothing explodes. It begins a bit slowly, until the viewer learns a bit of the backstory of the protagonist. A pleasant diversion for an evening's entertainment.

Before the bodies of Spanish royalty are consigned to their gilded crypts, they are first consigned to a special chamber to allow the flesh to decay.

Rotting Room is the unglamorous translation of “El Pudridero.”
When Felipe II designed the gargantuan El Escorial royal complex in the
16th century northwest of Madrid, he practically made it a shrine of
death... Located behind the Pantheon walls, accessible only to monks at the
Escorial monastery, this is a secretive room accessed by a private
passage...
It’s here where for at least 20 years mortal kings — and queens who
birthed kings — decompose beneath lime until they are completely bone.

When I lived in Kentucky in the 1980s, I had several opportunities to hear the Metropolitan Blues All Stars perform. The group members came from in the hills of Eastern Kentucky; they came to Lexington for concert performances (or to Louisville for Lonesome Pine Specials as in the 1987 one embedded above).

I particularly remember Rodney Hatfield's prolonged harmonica riffs, and I have an old VCR tape with Caroline Dahl really rocking the keyboard; I understand she later moved on to San Francisco for a successful career there.

For those unfamiliar with the publication: "The Onionis an American digital media company and news satire organization... The Onion's
articles cover current events, both real and fictional, satirizing the
tone and format of traditional news organizations with stories,
editorials, op-ed pieces, and man-in-the-street interviews using a traditional news website layout and an editorial voice modeled after that of the Associated Press. The publication's humor often depends on presenting mundane, everyday events as newsworthy, surreal or alarming.

Each year, the University of Southern California brings delegations
from Africa to meet with business leaders, government officials and
others in the U.S. But this year, the African summit has no Africans.
All were denied visas.

Visa issues are not uncommon for people traveling from African
nations. During her prior three summits, Mary Flowers saw a high
percentage of her attendees at the African Global Economic and
Development Summit, unable to attain visas.

"Usually we get 40 percent that get rejected but the others come,"
said Flowers, chair of the African Global Economic and Development
Summit. "This year it was 100 percent. Every delegation. And it was sad
to see, because these people were so disheartened."

Flowers estimated that she lost about 100 attendees, including
speakers and government officials. The countries affected included
Sierra Leone, Guinea, Ghana, Nigeria, Ethiopia and South Africa.

16 March 2017

The puzzle above may seem hopeless for white, with just a King and
four pawns remaining, but it is possible to draw and even win.

Scientists have constructed it in a way to confound a chess computer, which would normally consider that it is a win for black. However an average chess-playing human should be able to see that a draw is possible. A chess computer struggles because it looks like an impossible position, even though it is perfectly legal...

The first person who can demonstrate the solution legally will receive a bonus prize.

Both humans, computers and even quantum computers are invited to play
the game and solutions should be emailed to
puzzles@penroseinstitute.com.

On
a recent snowy day the warehouse’s 65-year-old proprietor, Elizabeth
McLellan, gave an indignant accounting: She yanked a urinary catheter
out of one bin. It’s unopened and has an expiration date of July 2018.
“There’s no reason to get rid of this.” A box of 30 new feeding bags has
an August 2019 expiration date. The same type sells on Amazon.com for
$129.

That surgical stapler? It’s unopened. The same model sells
online for $189. And McLellan simply shook her head over a set of a
dozen long thin laparoscopic surgery instruments that some hospital
discarded. Similar used tools can go for hundreds of dollars.

“There’s nothing wrong with these, nothing wrong with any of these,” she said.

Ten
years ago, McLellan, a registered nurse, shocked to see what hospitals
were tossing out, began asking them to give her their castoffs instead.
In 2009 she launched Partners for World Health, a nonprofit that now has
four warehouses throughout Maine. Today, she and hundreds of volunteers
collect medical equipment and supplies from a network of hospitals and
medical clinics, sort them and eventually ship containers full of them
to countries like Greece, Syria and Uganda...

MedShare, a Georgia-based nonprofit more than 10 times the size of
Partners, sent 156 containers of discarded medical supplies to
developing countries last year, each one worth as much as $175,000...

McLellan started her nonprofit after watching patient rooms being
cleaned out at Maine Medical Center, where she was a nurse
administrator. When patients were discharged, hospital staff threw out
everything, including unopened supplies. McLellan got permission from
the hospital’s CEO to put out bins to save the discarded items.

A
year and a half later, she’d gathered more than 11,000 pounds of
supplies and equipment in her house. Today, Partners has three paid
employees — McLellan is a volunteer — and an annual budget of $357,000,
most of it from individual donations. Hundreds of volunteers pitch in.
Similar nonprofits have sprung up around the country...

And those pallets of adult diapers stacked high on a shelf? He sells the
same type at his pharmacy for $11.99 per package or more. Farren
recalled one time they picked up about 100 unopened packages of diapers
from the home of a patient who had died. “It was ridiculous,” he said.

14 March 2017

He says no. But lots of people are discussing openly the possibility of the Democratic party nominating a non-politician for the office of President.

The underlying logic would be that the president needs to represent the people, but he/she doesn't need to be an expert on law, or war or economics or education. The president has (or at least should have) a staff and aides to provide analysis and expert opinions. The president meets with other foreign leaders with a major role in diplomacy, and needs to communicate effectively with Congress and the people.

Michael Moore was the first person I heard who advocated this change, speaking just a week after Donald Trump was elected:

Moore, speaking on CNN’s State of the Union show, said the leadership
vacuum that will result from the departures of Hillary Clinton and
Barack Obama would best be filled by a well-liked celebrity.

Moore continued: “Why don’t we run somebody that the American people
love and are really drawn to, and that are smart and have good politics
and all that?”

A CNN article discusses the possibility of Oprah Winfrey campaigning for the presidency. There is also a relevant article in New Republic.

Other celebrities who might consider running for political
office (not necessarily for the presidency) include Will Smith, Roseanne Barr, Angelina Jolie, Kanye West, and Mark Zuckerberg.

"Traditionalists" who cringe at the thought of celebrities invading politics might do well to remember that (IIRC) one of the concepts of the Founding Fathers was that state and national legislators should be ordinary people who could put aside their hammers and plowshares and travel to the capitol to manage the country, then return to their work (although they themselves were elite aristocrats).

Deconstruction... entails taking a house apart, piece by piece, down to
the foundation. The majority of what is removed from a house via
deconstruction can be recycled or reused. Everything removed from the
house and donated to a qualified 501(c)3 charity can be claimed by the
property owners on their taxes as a donation at fair market value...

The deconstruction appraiser determines what materials can be
salvaged and estimates the value of the donations. As the process
unfolds, the appraiser prepares a report that lists every component to
be donated and its fair market value; completes IRS Form 8283 for the
donor valuing the material (the nonprofit recipients complete the form,
too); ensures that the donor has the required documentation to claim
full benefits from the donation, and stands behind all this if the IRS
has any questions about the donation. The deconstruction company dismantles the house, sorts the materials and transports them to centers for recycling or resale...

Deconstruction costs more than conventional demolition because the
materials need to be carefully removed and preserved in usable
condition. Stahl says demolition might cost $8,000 to $11,000 for a
typical house and take up to a week to complete. Deconstructing the same
house might cost as much as $24,000, she says, and take two weeks...

Generally speaking, Smith says, “85 to 90 percent of a house can be
recycled or repurposed. About the only things that cannot yet be
salvaged or repurposed are drywall, rotted materials and broken pieces
of ceramic tile or marble.”

American readers of this blog who are of a certain age will very likely remember watching Gallagher on television in the 1980s. He started his career as a conventional stand-up comedian, making use of his collegiate studies as an English major (!) to regale his audience with the oddities of the language...

"Con is the opposite of pro. So Congress must be the opposite of progress."

And so on. Then he found his shtick in physical comedy, and parlayed that into a series of television specials.

People living in tick-endemic areas around the world are being warned
of an increasingly prevalent, potentially life-threatening side effect
to being bitten: developing a severe allergy to meat.

The link between tick bites and meat allergies was first described in 2007, and has since been confirmed around the world.

Sufferers of “tick-induced mammalian meat allergy” will experience a
delayed reaction of between two and 10 hours after eating red meat.
Almost invariably, they are found to have been bitten by a tick –
sometimes as much as six months before.

Although most cases of tick bites of humans are uneventful, some
immune systems are sensitive to proteins in the parasite’s saliva and
become intolerant of red meat and, in some cases, derivatives such as
dairy and gelatine. Poultry and seafood can be tolerated, but many sufferers choose to avoid meat entirely.

Cases of the emergent allergy have been reported in Europe, Asia, Central America and Africa,
but it is most prevalent – and on the rise – in parts of Australia and
the United States where ticks are endemic and host populations are
booming.

I have previously posted a number of articles about former Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who I think is a more complex character than the monomaniacal ogre portrayed by some Western media. When I last heard of him, he was a university professor. Now he has established a Twitter account, and a Guardian article suggests that "it’s only a matter of days before we see him mention
@realDonaldTrump, potentially sparking a clash of two of the world’s
most famous rabble rousers."

Your Excellency has been elected, in the recent US election, as the president of the country. It
can be inferred from the political and media atmosphere in the US that
the result of the election has been despite the status quo, and beyond
the will and prediction of the governing body and the main system behind
the scene of the US political stage...

Welcoming this and hoping it will have an effect, I hereby share some
points with you, whereas I’d tried in the past to convey some important
matters to the two preceding presidents, via letters...

This letter is by no means political, in the common sense of the world;
nonetheless, today it is from a human to another human. The letter is
from a humane standpoint, rooted in interest toward and compassion for
the American nation and other nations, and I expect your Excellency to
read it from the same perspective, adopting a humane approach...

Your Excellency and I are, like other human beings, servants and
creatures of The Only God, and have been created for an eternal life.
God has not created us for enmity, hegemony and aggressiveness. People
are all equal and in terms of possessing land, wealth, God-given
opportunities and human rights, they’re alike. The true essence of human
blossoms through monotheism, loving others and making endeavors toward
the well-being and prosperity of others...

Having been elected the US president is a
historic opportunity primarily for the elected person and secondly for
the electorates and other nations. Although four years is a long period,
but it ends quickly. The opportunity needs to be valued, and all its
moments need to be used in the best way.

Those elected by nations and the rulers should never consider
themselves being superior to people, or being their masters and dominant
over people’s affairs. The rulers’ capacity is but to be humble toward
the people, to serve them, and to follow up their demands...

What outcome has meddling in other’s
affairs and military deployments to other regions and imposing thousands
of US military, security and intelligence bases across the globe had,
except for insecurity, war, division, killing and displacement of
nations? Have the measures brought about anything beyond hatred and
animosity toward US leaders, notoriety for the US people and imposition
of military expenditures?

If
all governments want to show behavior similar to the US administration,
which visible horizon of peace and security will lie ahead of the human
society? Isn’t it better to stop warmongering and not to interfere
militarily in other regions of the world, in order to create an
atmosphere of international understanding and to end the arms race, war
and killing of people?...

If Your Excellency takes the initiative
to remove the deadly arms race and stop the military presence and
intervention in other regions, the annual killing and displacement of
millions of human beings will be prevented. If so, hundreds of billions
of dollars of global military and security costs will be reduced, to be
spent in the health, education and welfare of nations, as well as in
reducing the social gap and other problems, and to uproot insecurity.

Hasn’t
the time come for all of us to believe that the human society needs
human thought, justice and brotherhood more than arms and military
power? Arrogance is a devilish deed and the root cause of all problems
in the human society. Hasn’t the time come to change arms to pens, and
to replace arrogance, discrimination and hatred with love, equality and
brotherhood?..

Women depict God’s beauty and are God’s
most beautiful and valuable gift. Respecting women and dignifying them,
is a sign of magnanimity.

The
great men of history have paid the highest level of respect to women
and recognized their God-given capabilities. Women’s role in the life
and perfection of human society is special and in the best and highest
form. Women’s management in domains of science, society, culture, etc.
has been among the most precise and excellent...

I pray to God The Merciful for all
nations and also for the people of US glory, prosperity, peace, freedom,
justice and welfare and for Your Excellency, success in performing the
heavy duty of reforming the structure of the US system and in responding
to people’s demand.

(1947) A Bulletin "agent" reports that graffiti have been scrawled on
Claverly Hall: "Héloïse loves Abélard" on one corner, "Henry Tudor is
insatiable" on another.

I know graffiti is a plural noun, but I use it as singular. Am I in big trouble? Apparently not...

In Italian the word graffiti is a plural
noun and its singular form is graffito. Traditionally, the same
distinction has been maintained in English, so that graffiti, being
plural, would require a plural verb: the graffiti were all over the
wall. By the same token, the singular would require a singular verb:
there was a graffito on the wall. Today, these distinctions survive in
some specialist fields such as archaeology but sound odd to most native
speakers. The most common modern use is to treat graffiti as if it were a mass noun, similar to a word like writing, and not to use graffito at all. In this case, graffiti takes a singular verb, as in the graffiti
was all over the wall. Such uses are now widely accepted as standard. A
similar process is going on with other words such as agenda, data, and
media.

Apollonius of Tyana... was a Greek Neopythagorean philosopher from the town of Tyana in the Roman province of Cappadocia in Anatolia. He was an orator and philosopher around the time of Jesus, and was compared with Jesus of Nazareth by Christians in the 4th century and by other writers in modern times.

As summarized by Bart D. Ehrman:

Even before he was born, it was known that he would be someone special. A
supernatural being informed his mother the child she was to conceive
would not be a mere mortal but would be divine. He was born
miraculously, and he became an unusually precocious young man. As an
adult he left home and went on an itinerant preaching ministry, urging
his listeners to live, not for the material things of this world, but
for what is spiritual. He gathered a number of disciples around him, who
became convinced that his teachings were divinely inspired, in no small
part because he himself was divine. He proved it to them by doing many
miracles, healing the sick, casting out demons, and raising the dead.
But at the end of his life he roused opposition, and his enemies
delivered him over to the Roman authorities for judgment. Still, after
he left this world, he returned to meet his followers in order to
convince them that he was not really dead but lived on in the heavenly
realm. Later some of his followers wrote books about him.

07 March 2017

"When [President] Roosevelt heard that a torpedo was zooming toward him, he asked to be moved with his wheelchair over to the
railing so that he could see it. Fearing an assassination plot, the
Iowa turned its guns toward the William D. Porter — however, the crisis
ended when the torpedo finally detonated as it struck heavy waves
created by the Iowa’s increased speed. Walter reportedly answered with a
meek “We did it” when pressed. The entire crew was placed under arrest
and sent to Bermuda to face trial — the first instance in U.S. Naval
history that the entire crew of a ship had been arrested."

"The 588th was the most highly decorated female unit in [the Soviet air force in WWII],
flying 30,000 missions over the course of four years -- and dropping, in
total, 23,000 tons of bombs on invading German armies. Its members, who ranged in age from 17 to 26,
flew primarily at night, making do with planes that were -- per their
plywood-and-canvas construction -- generally reserved for training and
crop-dusting. They often operated in stealth mode, idling their engines
as they neared their targets and then gliding their way to their bomb
release points.

About those little dots on your car windows. "Most importantly, it acts to prevents ultraviolet sun rays from deteriorating the urethane sealant." And "there’s another group of dots on the windshield right behind the
rearview mirror. As shown in the clip below, these dots, called the
“third visor frit,” are there to help block the sun as it beams in from
between the two front sun-visors."

Everything you need to know (or not) about the baton or truncheon (also called a cosh, billystick, billy club, nightstick, sap, blackjack). "The one for daytime was called a day-stick and was 11 inches in length.
Another baton, that was used at night, was 26 inches long and called a
night-stick, which is the origin of the word "nightstick"."

Someone did a detailed analysis of the most recent Super Bowl (LI) and determined that the ball was in play for a total of 16 minutes and 4 seconds. "There were 178 plays (including kickoffs, point-afters, spikes, etc) with the average play being only 5.47 seconds long."

Dragonfly wings kill bacteria. "...the bacteria are essentially caught in one of those sinister traps of
which movie villains are quite fond. If they don't move, the bacteria
might survive. However, when they do move, shear forces pull
on the EPSs, ripping the membrane apart. This results in a
fatal leakage of cellular contents, which causes the cell to deflate
like a balloon..."

Why British roads are called "metalled" when they have no metal. "Gravel is known to have been used extensively in the construction of roads by soldiers of the Roman Empire, but a limestone-surfaced road, thought to date back to the Bronze Age, has been found in Britain. Applying gravel, or "metalling," has had two distinct usages in road surfacing. The term road metal refers to the broken stone or cinders used in the construction or repair of roads or railways, and is derived from the Latin metallum, which means both "mine" and "quarry". The term originally referred to the process of creating a gravel roadway.

"The paternoster is kind of elevator that consist of a chain of open
compartments that move up and down continuously through the vertical
shaft of a building in a loop and without stopping. Passengers step into
the moving compartments in the direction they wish to go and then hop
off when the elevator reaches the desired floor. There is no stopping in
between the floors, and passengers must remain alert and get their
timing right or else get severed."

"Now, Bzeek spends long days and sleepless nights caring for a
bedridden 6-year-old foster girl with a rare brain defect. She’s blind
and deaf. She has daily seizures. Her arms and legs are paralyzed. Bzeek, a quiet, devout Libyan-born Muslim who lives in Azusa, just wants her to know she’s not alone in this life. “I
know she can’t hear, can’t see, but I always talk to her,” he said.
“I’m always holding her, playing with her, touching her. … She has
feelings. She has a soul. She’s a human being.”

An argument that the phrase "Dark Ages" is inappropriate. "Far from being a stagnant dark age, as the first half of the Medieval
Period (500-1000 AD) certainly was, the period from 1000 to 1500 AD
actually saw the most impressive flowering of scientific inquiry and
discovery since the time of the ancient Greeks, far eclipsing the Roman
and Hellenic Eras in every respect."

The Bay of Bengal is dying. "Many once-abundant species have all but disappeared.... Fish stocks have been decimated by methods that include cyanide
poisoning. The region was once famous for its coral reefs; these have
been ravaged by dynamite-fishing and climate-change induced bleaching.
Yet the exploitation of these waters continues without check."

"Queen Elizabeth had her own “Watchers,” a network of agents who
intercepted letters, cracked codes, and captured possible dissenters to
protect the crown in secret. The queen’s network of spies formed the
original surveillance state in the U.K., and she started it for good
reason... When spying abroad, Dee signed each private letter to Elizabeth with the insignia “007”—a moniker that was later borrowed by Ian Fleming, writer
of James Bond."

"Tai-wiki-widbee" is an eclectic mix of trivialities, ephemera, curiosities, and exotica with a smattering of current events, social commentary, science, history, English language and literature, videos, and humor. We try to be the cyberequivalent of a Victorian cabinet of curiosities.

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I'm using an old photo of my grandfather as an avatar; he would have been amused.
Readers - especially old friends, classmates, students, former colleagues, and long-lost relatives - are welcome to email me via retag4726 (at) mypacks.net